Dark Lady
by Rumour of an Alchemist
Summary: Potentially slightly silly, slightly creepy, one-shot. Lord Voldemort's attack of Hallowe'en, 1981, winds up with a somewhat different result from canon. Rated 'T'.


Disclaimer: I am _not_ J. K. Rowling. I do not own Harry Potter.

Note: The following is set in an alternate universe where Voldemort's attack on the Potter of Hallowe'en, 1981, winds up with a somewhat different result to canon. I have no idea if magic would work this way in the canon universe, and it's probable that a prophecy which set Lord Voldemort after the Potters in this universe was slightly more ambiguously worded than canon. This story is a slightly silly one-shot, and rated 'T'.

* * *

The woman groaned and stirred.

Everything was so confusing. The Dark Lord had pointed his wand at the infant, and with a desperate scream, the woman had somehow torn herself free and flung herself across the intervening space as the light of the spell flashed, and something not expected had happened.

The clarion call of the toddler crying sounded, insistently, and the woman groaned again and forced her eyes open. She wanted to kill him. She wanted to love and protect him. She wanted, she wanted…

Her eyes went wide – olive green eyes which had perhaps been a slightly different tone at the start of the evening.

She _was_ the Dark Lord. She had all his hungers, all his lusts, all his desire for power, his memories of spellcraft, the secret knowledge of the names of his followers.

She _was_ Lily Potter, with all of her own lusts, desires, and memories too. And with a few secrets of her own.

She was… both?

She needed the child to stop crying. It was disturbing her. The prophesised possible threat. Her son and heir.

_Possible_ threat she forcibly told herself. Not _definite_.

She went and picked him up and held him to herself.

She quietened and calmed him. She went to retrieve her wand, no _wands_ from where they lay by the body which had been discarded on the floor. They writhed in her hands as she picked them up and rather disturbingly like serpents snaked and twined around one another. Within moments the wands were one wand, integrating as she was already integrating herself.

She searched her memories. _Neither can live whilst the other survives_, Albus had told her the prophecy. Albus had thought that that meant Lord Voldemort and an infant were destined to destroy one another. What if instead it had been referring to what was happening to her now? That _she_ was destined to become; something which had once been Lord Voldemort, and something which had once been Lily Potter?

Rocking her son gently against herself she went downstairs. James was dead of course. She'd killed him to get to herself. She knew that but she needed to see it.

And there he was, lying there.

She flicked her wand, and manipulated the body, making it look peaceful, closing the eyes. His loss was unfortunate and something which she regretted. He would have been a useful servant, or perhaps even ally.

There was someone coming, her spells warned her. She applied a hasty temporary glamour to disguise the changed nature of her wand as she went to the door to open it, and found Sirius Black standing there, a desperately anxious expression on his face.

Sirius Black – the only man alive loyal to Dumbledore who knew the Potters had switched secret keepers.

Well, the only one unless he'd told someone else in the past few hours. He was here now, he looked worried, _something_ had clearly rattled him. She risked a little legilimency and discovered he'd gone to look for Peter to catch up with him about the last day or two and found him unexpectedly missing. And full of half-suspicions and dreads he'd raced here…

She was The Dark Lady – one of the most skilled legilimens of the century – but she didn't have time to properly search Sirius' mind right now, she couldn't risk it that he hadn't sent some message about the switch of secret keepers, and she might need either of them – Sirius Black _or_ Peter Pettigrew – at some point in the future.

She turned on the tears, in floods. She spun a tale of how the Dark Lord had burst in, killed James, tried to do something to her, but it had misfired – perhaps James had somehow done something to him which he hadn't realised?

She sobbed as she said how before he tried to kill her Voldemort had boasted of capturing Peter Pettigrew in a random sweep – how he had tortured him for well over an hour, before the man had finally broken, and started saying things – crazy things – anything to get the pain to stop, and how the secret had slipped out in amongst the ravings.

She said she desperately needed to go and look. To try and find Peter. To rescue him, but that she couldn't take Harry with her. Could Sirius look after him please, for a few hours, and put things in such order as he could here?

Sirius was confused, stressed, and tired. He was presented with a woman apparently crazy with grief and not thinking too straight herself, and who might not be susceptible to long arguments. He took the easy route, and agreed to look after Harry.

Lily really would rather not have left Harry behind, but she needed to get out to find Peter (she had some suspicions where he'd be hiding right now) to prep him for the story she'd just given Sirius, and (rather more urgently) to call the inner circle of her Death Eaters to herself, to explain the changes which would be going forward from this moment – and Sirius needed distracting from bothering her further in the immediate future. And if she was going to leave Harry behind anywhere (and perhaps taking her son to her first Death Eater meeting in her new guise was perhaps not the most _rational_ of choices) then he would be as safe with Sirius as with anyone – though just to be sure she made Sirius _promise_ to take care of him.

Then she went off, to Spinner's End, and Severus Snape, her fury rising at every moment. Snape had betrayed her, at least once, if not doubly so. He had told her part of the prophecy in the first place, and, putting the pieces together, Lily reckoned he almost certainly had gone to Dumbledore _after_ that, to alert the Hogwarts headmaster that she had been looking for the Potters. The traitor's wards and pitiful defences could not stand before her ire, and she swept into his house – his miserable _muggle_ father's house – and subdued him, then subjected him to the fiercest legilimency she could muster.

His defences crumbled, as they had never done before, and she saw exposed the full pathetic nature of his soul.

"Get up." she said at last, reining in her anger. Behind all the lies and masks and layers, at heart Severus Snape was a simple man with one simple truth: His life was built around his hatred of her, and his love of her. "I am transfigured, Severus, since last you saw me. I _am_ what was Lord Voldemort, and I _am_ Lily Evans. And I am become a lady, dark and terrible and worshipful." Half remembered lines of Tolkien drifted through her mind. She had to resist an urge to fling wide her arms and shout that all would love her and despair.

Galadriel had made the wrong choice. Galadriel _should_ have taken the ring, instead of leaving it to all those idiot men to make a mess of things and to get thousands of people unnecessarily killed.

If it had been her in the story, Lily _would_ have taken Tolkien's 'One Ring' at this moment. Greater power for herself. Greater power to protect her son. Greater power to build the empire for she and her dynasty to govern.

Severus looked at her, a look of horror and realisation on his face, hopeless surrender and submission dawning as he saw that there _was_ enough of what he had always loved and loathed in her for him to be unable to gainsay her sway.

"I need your arm, Severus. I am going to summon my most loyal Death Eaters, and you are going to stand at my side as I explain to them the way in which their leadership has become changed and that – for now, whilst we regroup, and explore other avenues – there is an opportunity for a cessation of hostilities. After all, I am dead now, the great and terrible dark lord! Sirius Black is currently guarding the body. There would be no surprise if the war were to apparently end! But the war is _not_ over, Severus. It is simply shifting to a different plane, for a while, and it is one which we _shall_ win."

* * *

She needed to _crucio_ only a couple of the inner-circle Death Eaters, in the end, to gain her point and (for now) acknowledgement that their allegiance had shifted in a manner of speaking.

The show of the wand helped. Between that and the old, familiar, style of inflicting torment, with a twist that now it had the fiery desire for vengeance of a woman, she convinced them, and if that didn't, the twisting of their marks with the touch of her wand did.

She gave her orders, as to who was to flee, who was to turn Ministry evidence, who was to plead Imperius Curse. Not everyone would keep their heads of course, and those most susceptible to pressure would be confunded, as necessary, to keep what was actually going on and herself (as dark lady) hidden from the Ministry.

Put on the spot, Severus had managed to come up with a remarkably coherent plan in a remarkably short time for the end of the war on the Death Eater side, before she pressed his mark to call them home.

She had thought that Bellatrix might prove problematic, but oddly, Bellatrix had been unquestioning of her from the moment that Bellatrix had apparated in. Somehow, Bellatrix had recognised that her lord and master was now her dark lady and mistress.

"I need you and your husband abroad. I need the Lestranges to have heirs, Bellatrix." Lily instructed Bellatrix, before dismissing her. "I do not plan for the conflict to take quite such a martial twist again for some years, yet, but if and when it should do so, I require another generation of Lestranges to be there to take up their wands for me. See to it, please."

"Yes my lady." Bellatrix had said, her eyes burning with fervour, as she bent to kiss Lily's hand before departing.

The way the campaign had been run up until now had been almost criminally stupid in the waste of precious magical blood, Lily considered. The _next_ war, when it came, whomever it was directed against, would fall as a storm, on a completely unprepared enemy, but _only_ once a safety in sufficient numbers to ensure future generations was on their side.

Bellatrix was useful in a fight, but it would be even more useful if she passed on some of those qualities to at least a son or daughter – or better yet, passed them on to _several_ sons and daughters.

Now came the hardest parts so far of tonight: Peter Pettigrew and then Dumbledore.

Finding Peter would be a doddle given the information on both the sides of his life and all the magic that she had at her disposal. Once she had tracked him down she would have to weave a glamour about both herself and her wand and torture Peter, so he had genuine memories of being tortured by someone who looked like Voldemort to present in the circumstance of legilimency being used upon him. At least there wasn't any problem of a dark mark to remove – Peter Pettigrew, a snivelling little rat, had hardly done anything to date to qualify himself to be considered a member of the inner-circle of Death Eaters. Spilling a few Order secrets which Voldemort had already known or guessed had been about the extent of his 'treachery' other than in betraying the location of the Potters in Godric's Hollow. Albus Dumbledore kept information too close to his chest, revealing only on an annoyingly cautious 'need to know' basis – and then often under all sorts of vows and safeguards – for Peter to have known anything truly worthwhile.

Although _maybe_ Peter would be safer dead. Did she _actually_ need something as pathetic as Peter Pettigrew?

Then again, his patheticness made him useful of course. _Before_ she had 'become', the part of her which had been just plain Lily Potter would _never_ have countenanced him as capable of treachery.

Perhaps Peter had his uses, therefore, but he would _have_ to be tightly kept an eye upon.

She would kill him of course, in an instant, if it ever seemed likely that he might become a liability.

But anyway, first deal with Peter, and then return to Godric's Hollow with him half-dead but 'rescued', and then collect Harry and go to see Dumbledore. Of course, if she were inclined to reckless risk-taking, she would gain Dumbledore's presence and then simply try to assassinate him, but she had not seen enough of him duelling in full-fury, remaining as he had done out of the fray, to truly know what he was capable of doing. She could not count on surprise being enough, least of all on his home ground of Hogwarts. No, Albus Dumbledore would have to wait, for now, or at least a spell confrontation with him would have to do so. She would instead have to give him a version of the truth with just enough of that which he would _want_ to hear mixed in, though he would likely summon Severus in at some point to try to gain verification from him as to the Death Eater side of things. She just hoped that Severus' acting abilities were up to deceiving Albus Dumbledore as surely as he had previously deceived the Dark Lord…

* * *

Author Notes:

I think I first came across the idea of merging souls some years back in a (to my tastes and mind) rather bleak philosophical treatise dressed up in a science-fiction novel's clothes called _A Voyage to Arcturus_ by David Lindsay. I do not recommend the book, but I acknowledge one idea from it as a probable source of inspiration for this story.

As mentioned in the opening note to this story, I have no idea if magic in the canon Harry Potter universe could result in anything like the situation of this story happening; the point of this story is that in this universe (for whatever reason) when Lord Voldemort attacks Lily it does.

Besides a probably more ambiguous prophecy, another difference of this universe from canon is that Lily obviously had her wand in at least the same room as her, if not in hand, when Lord Voldemort confronted her in the run in to this piece.

Lord Voldemort has torn quite a few pieces off his own soul before the outset of this story. Consequently, although, as the older, more powerful person in the fusing of Lily/Voldemort, his ambitions of conquest are _largely_ dominant, Lily's own goals of protecting her child are pre-eminent.

Lily Voldemort hasn't _quite_ thought through all the possible ramifications and pit-falls of her current course of action - such as Albus possibly asking to inspect her memories of events in his pensieve, so he can try to work out what happened (if he thinks it might be important). Of course, initially, Albus is likely to be too busy notifying the Ministry, etc, that Voldemort is dead to bother looking at the finer details of what occurred, and it's possible that Lily Voldemort isn't aware from her previous experiences as either Lily Potter or as Lord Voldemort that Albus Dumbledore possesses memory inspection facilities in the shape of a pensieve. (Lack of consideration on Lily Voldemort's part for the pensieve is certainly more understandable if a line popular in some fanfictions that Albus might have invented the device is assumed for this universe; at this point it could be very much still his own private secret, or even not yet created, if the pensieve originates with him.)

This story is a one-shot.


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